Golden Bay People

Thank you to the GB Weekly for allowing us to reproduce these articles here. Please visit their site for more stories about Golden Bay people, as well as recipes, letters, movie reviews and more.

 

 

Artist and housetruck fan launches exhibition

During the winter months, Luane Brauner’s sensual depictions of local characters, pets and landscapes, in oil and acrylics, pastels and watercolours, can be viewed at the Dangerous Kitchen Café over a steaming cup of coffee.


Luane moved to Golden Bay from East Germany two years ago and has since joined the local art scene, painting portraits and commissioned works.
“Golden Bay fascinates me: it is the friendliness of the people and the many layers of the society, from conservative to the alternative; it is all possible and acceptable. Then there is the wide range of art and artists which makes life here so interesting, and then of course the beauty of the physical environment is inspiring.”


Housetrucks in particular have captured her imagination, and Luane has decided to work towards a book with her own paintings and text on the trucks and housetrucking culture.
“When I came to New Zealand, I was amazed by housetrucks and the lifestyle that comes with them. It was so unusual, and New Zealand is probably one of the few countries where people are still allowed to drive these home-made trucks around.” The self-taught painter began her creative process by full immersion, and bought herself a beautifully restored housetruck which functions both as her home and studio. “I cannot write a book about it if I don’t experience what it is like to live in one.”
Luane has always been interested in art, saying she “came into the world like this”.


“As a teenager I painted portraits of rock bands onto T-shirts and sold them to earn some pocket money.” When Luane began painting full-time 20 years ago, while living with her family in an isolated house surrounded by forest, art materials were still in short supply in East Germany, and she only had time to paint after the children were tucked up in bed. Later she began to give art lessons, which she intends to do again after a short visit to the northern hemisphere.
In the meantime, Luane can be contacted via email on <l.brauner@gmx.de>.

Ina Holst (22 May 2009)

 

Gillian Jackson recalls climbing adventures

“Once you’ve looked death in the face there is nothing left to be feared,” says Collingwood resident Gillian Jackson, reflecting on the courage she mustered some 60 years ago that enabled her to climb steep summits, struggle up icy glaciers and risk being swamped by avalanches and rockfalls. “Of course we had no helmets in those days, or safety gear; we just climbed it.”


At an illustrated talk at the library last week, Gillian, now aged 80, singlehandedly entertained lovers of the outdoors with humorous anecdotes about her climbing days, and left everybody in awe as she showed her breathtaking black-and-white slides and hauled out kilos of climbing equipment—polished ice-picks, the heavy japare (a kind of oil cloth), the metal crampons kept on a wooden board, the sisal ropes and the solid backpack.


“We had no lightweight materials in those days and our mountain mules and crampons were quite a bit different from nowadays’ equipment. There were no boots made then for women climbers either, and I had to wear schoolboy’s boots, which were just like cardboard. I never did a trip without thousands of blisters and I lost my toenails several times,” she told the gathered crowd. “Out tent had no floor and we had to lay on the bare rocks or we had rock bivvys and only our sleeping bag covers for shelter. I loved the old huts, but so many of the dear little huts have disappeared now.”

Read more on the GB Weekly site .....

Ina Holst (27 August 2009)

 

Local runner returns from Kalahari Desert marathon

Averill Turnbull surely looks like a long-distance runner. Lean, long-limbed and strong, Averill has just returned from the Kalahari Augrabies Extreme Marathon held in early October.


Running 237km across the African desert in seven days, in temperatures of 40° Celsius, was a challenging yet deeply satisfying adventure, said Averill.
“It was my first multi-day event and I want to go back next year. It was very dry and hot during the race, although we had a thunderstorm the day before. Last year it was 10 degrees hotter, and 30 per cent of the runners did not make it, so this year it was quite a ‘cold event’. I wanted to see how I go in the heat and I trained really well for it by running in three thermal layers and a goosedown jacket and sitting in the sauna afterwards. The training was actually worse than the event.”


Averill was the only New Zealander among 73 participants from 12 different countries who started the 10th desert marathon this year. It is a self-sufficiency race, where runners have to carry everything needed for the entire trip, including food. The race is run over six legs in seven days with set distances for each day, ranging from 28 to 82km and through varied terrain. The 250km route was suddenly shortened to 237km as an area under a land claim had to be avoided, and the runners had to be evacuated from the vicinity during the night.


Read more on the GB Weekly site .....

Ina Holst (5 November 2009)

 

Facts and Footnotes

Rocks and Hard Places fills local history gap

The launch this week of Rocks and Hard Places, another illustrated local history book by River Press, this time about the Takaka Hill, is the culmination of a literary dream for its 78-year-old author, Cliff Turley of Patons Rock.


Cliff’s lifelong fascination with the longest hill route in the country reflects well in all the stories and remarkable photos he has collected into this book, which fills a significant gap in our local history.


At 184 pages and packed with photos, diagrams and anecdotes, it’s one of those books you could pore through for months and still pick up interesting snippets, from a description of the first recorded crossing of the Pikikiruna Range in 1843 by Heaphy, right up to The Gathering dance parties at Canaan.


The exploits of those who first trudged over the Hill—from surveyors to goldminers to packmen and priests—all make interesting reading, as do the succession of roadmen, engineers, quarrymen and settlers who made the Marble Mountain their lives. Recognisable generational family names like Harwood, Sixtus, Henderson, Page, Bruning, Savage and Richards all jump out at you, first from the photo captions then from the fuller stories of generous explanatory text.


The book culminates in pictures and descriptions of the various Gatherings held up at Canaan, which actually started as a motorcycle club meet amongst the rolling glades and sinkholes of Canaan during the early 1980s. These were organised by the likes of local bikers Bruce Burnett and Joe Stocker.


Cliff says that collating and writing the book was a 10-year-plus project. “I became aware that many of the older drivers and roadmen were literally a dying breed,” he says. “It was obvious that if I didn’t get their experiences down, all that history would be lost.”


So he started in 1994 by taping the experiences of 90-year-old Reg Page, a former Farewell Spit Lighthouse Keeper who became a popular Gibbs Motors driver from 1922-40. Later with Bill Gibbs, Reg owned “Big Green”, a Hudson Super Six that carried passengers over the Hill on a near-daily basis, offering a door-to-door service.

Read more on the GB Weekly site ....

Gerard Hindmarsh (19 February 2009)



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